Our votes matter. In the last election, Missouri voters gave a clear mandate for fair maps. This year, we’ll do it again by voting no on Amendment 3.
Rodney E. Williams, pastor of Swope United Christian Church and president of the Kansas City Chapter of the NAACP.
In 2018, the voters of Missouri overwhelmingly approved Amendment 1 — better known as Clean Missouri — to make our state government more responsive to its people and to ensure a fair process when new legislative district lines are drawn. It passed by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, winning in every state Senate district across the state. Because policy was well-written and nonpartisan, it earned the support of an impressive array of leaders and organizations, including former Republican U.S. Sen. Jack Danforth, the League of Women Voters, AARP Missouri and the Missouri State Conference of the NAACP.
Some politicians in Jefferson City do not like the idea of nonpartisan redistricting that would create fair and competitive legislative maps. They want safe districts in which they can focus just on keeping a few big donors and partisans happy, and not have to worry about getting removed from office by voters in November. So they are proposing their own constitutional amendment to undermine the mandate from more than 1.4 million Missourians who voted for Clean Missouri in the last election. Even worse, they want to replace the voter-approved reforms with a truly extreme gerrymandering scheme unlike anything we’ve ever seen.
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These politicians’ gerrymandering plan, which could become Amendment 3, would create a more partisan redistricting process than we have ever had in Missouri, and its fine print would allow political consultants picked by partisan interests to carve up communities to protect their favored officials. Amendment 3 would even limit the people’s rights to challenge rigged maps in court, and would take away our current constitutional rights to see the data used for drawing the lines.
It gets worse. In the fine print of what politicians have sent to voters in the form of Amendment 3, there is a blueprint for what would be the most extreme gerrymandering in any statehouse map in the country. If this plan is passed and fully implemented, voters would be completely unable to hold their lawmakers accountable.
Amendment 3 would take Missouri’s legislative redistricting process out of the light and into backrooms controlled by powerful insiders who would be in charge of drawing electoral maps for the next decade.
The politician’s new gerrymandering scheme is also cleverly written to fundamentally change who counts in our state population. Like every other state in the country, Missouri counts everyone when dividing up districts to have equal population. But the politicians and lobbyists who wrote Amendment 3 want to open the door to a cynical plan that would make the redistricting count every ten years apply only to eligible Missourians of voting age — meaning any child under 18 years of age would not be counted as a person deserving of representation. That’s just wrong. If everyone in our families is not counted, our communities get shortchanged.
How do politicians think they’ll get away with this self-protection plan? By deceiving voters with misleading legislative window dressing, including a tiny change to lobbyist gift rules and campaign contribution limits. They propose lowering the cap on gifts lawmakers can receive by $5, and lowering campaign contribution limit for state senators by $100 — and hope you’ll buy what they’re selling. But we can all see that these shiny extras are designed to distract from their true goal: rigged maps made possible by the most extreme gerrymandering in the country.
This year is the politicians’ last chance to fix the system to protect their power and influence for the next decade before new maps are drawn next year. They’re determined to carry out their scheme, even in the midst of the current coronavirus crisis. At a time when Missourians desperately need help with real problems, these politicians are choosing to focus on undermining the voters to protect their own hides.
When we go to the polls, we expect our vote will be recorded and respected. We take our civic responsibility seriously, so much so that we’ll wait in lines, vote early on the way to work or vote absentee if we can’t be there on Election Day. Our votes matter. In the last election, Missouri voters gave a clear mandate for fair maps. This year, we’ll do it again by voting no on Amendment 3.
Originally published in the Kansas City Star on May 10. Read it at KansasCity.com.